So far I haven't seen any companies replicating what Google SRE does, blindly or intentionally. Much as this article describes, organizations I've seen are just inventing a role they perceive to exist in their organization and slapping the label "SRE" upon it. Often these roles are directly contradictory to the way Google SRE works: they are just carrying pagers for products they aren't allowed to improve, they own build/test/release for some reason even though that clearly falls in the domain of the developer, SREs are setting service levels which is obviously the responsibility of product.
I think people should realize that when you go into the hiring market looking for SREs, you are about to pay more, not less, for a highly qualified software engineer who is also a systems expert. You want these people to not just operate product, but to be closely involved in architecture and development so the product turns out to be operable. Your SREs should be working in the product code on the bits that ordinary developers might overlook or not be qualified to write, because they lack expertise in system or distributed systems behavior.
What this article is calling "real world" is just an attempt to redefine the term.
I think people should realize that when you go into the hiring market looking for SREs, you are about to pay more, not less, for a highly qualified software engineer who is also a systems expert. You want these people to not just operate product, but to be closely involved in architecture and development so the product turns out to be operable. Your SREs should be working in the product code on the bits that ordinary developers might overlook or not be qualified to write, because they lack expertise in system or distributed systems behavior.
What this article is calling "real world" is just an attempt to redefine the term.